If you think about getting this laptop, pick something else

Introduction

Warning: I’m not responsible for any damages or injury, including but not limited to special or consequential damages, that result from your use of this instructions.

Yesterday I’ve finally received my new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6 gen laptop. I cannot say anything bad about the hardware. It fits exactly into my needs and requirements. Unfortunately, there are some flaws when used with Linux (Ubuntu in my case). Here are some hints on how to make things better.

Touchpad and Trackpoint under Linux

This is the most irritating issue that you will encounter.

Note: Try the first solution presented here first. If it doesn’t help, fallback to the general solution.

Solution working with Kernel 4.17.1-041701-generic

Note: with this solution you may loose the “tap to click” functionality from time to time (until a reboot).

Edit the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file and comment out following line:

Personally, I use a bit lower temperature levels to preserve battery life in favor of performance. If you want to change the default values, you need to edit the /etc/lenovo_fix file and set the Trip_Temp_C for both battery and AC the way you want:

CPU undervolting

The amazing Lenovo Throttling fix script supports also the undervolting. To enable it, please edit the /etc/lenovo_fix.conf again and update the [UNDERVOLT] section. In my case, this settings proven to be stable:

Battery charging thresholds

There are a lot of theories and information about ThinkPad charging thresholds. Some theories say thresholds are needed to keep the battery healthy, some think they are useless and the battery will work the same just as it is. In this article I will try not to settle that argument. 🙂 Instead I try to tell how and why I use them, and then proceed to show how they can be changed in different versions of Windows, should you still want to change these thresholds.

I always stick with following settings for my laptops (and somehow I feel that it works):

Start threshold: 45%

Stop threshold: 75%

This means that the charging will start only if the battery level goes down below 45% and will stop at 75%. This prevents battery from being charged too often and from being charged beyond a recommended level.

To achieve this for Linux based machines you need to install some packages by running:

Note, that if you need to have your laptop fully charged, you can achieve that by running following command while connected to AC:

tlp fullcharge

Custom battery monitor / indicator

As you’ve probably already noticed, I really like keeping my laptop batteries in a good shape. It’s much easier, when you are aware of the state in which the battery is. Especially when it goes below 25% (as it is unhealthy for it). To get this type of notifications, you can just install the battery monitor app:

Due to a bug in Gnome, it’s initial message after startup won’t dissapear by itself and you need to close it each time you start Ubuntu. To eliminate that problem, edit the /usr/share/battery-monitor/config.py file and make it look like this (first message needs to be commented out):

Too small (or too big) letters for WQHD resolution

If you’ve got yourself Carbon version with the WQHD screen, you may notice that everything is extremely big (or super small). That’s because of the scaling factor. Unfortunately, you cannot use fractional scaling (more details here), which means that you’ll end up either with everything being super small (100%) or super large (200%).

Settings things using UI interface (Gnome-Tweak-Tools)

Install Gnome-Tweak-Tools as followed:

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

run it and set the Font Scaling Factor to 1,50.

HD (not WQHD) external monitor support

If you’ve used my scaling solution presented above everything will work great until you connect to an external screen with a lower resolution than a native WQHD. In that case, everything will be enormous. To bypass that, you can add this script into your Ubuntu startup programs. It will automatically detect an external screen with a lower resolution and will adapt all the scaling options (as long as connected during startup).

High pitched noise when using USB headphones with docking station

Took me a while to fix that one. You need to edit the /etc/pulse/default.pa file and disable the module-suspend-on-idle module:

### Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
# The line below needs to be commented out
# load-module module-suspend-on-idle

After a reboot, the pitched noise should no longer be present.

Unobtrusive mode

My previous Dell laptop had a great feature called Unobtrusive mode. By pressing Fn+B it would turn the screen off as well as keyboard and touchpad. Although I was unable to mimic the whole behavior, you can assign this command as a keyboard shortcut in Gnome to disable the screen upon pressing the Fn+B combination:

xset -display :0.0 dpms force off

Summary

I was kinda surprised with the amount of tuning required to make this laptop work with Ubuntu. I always considered Lenovo to be Linux friendly, especially that it is a brand loved by many programmers. On the other hand, maybe that’s exactly the reason why they didn’t put too much effort into making sure everything works out of the box. We’re programmers – we can fix that stuff on our own ;)